Responsibility for political conditions thousands of miles away can no longer be avoided, I think, by this great Nation. Certainly... I don't want to live to see another war. As I have said, the world is smaller, smaller every year. The United States now exerts a tremendous influence in the cause of peace. What we people over here are thinking and talking about is in the interest of peace because it is known all over the world. The slightest remark in either House of Congress is known all over the world the following day. We will continue to exert that influence only if we are willing to share in the responsibility of keeping the peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that I ...care. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the... profane.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced. Prejudgments becom...e prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. We tend to grow emotional when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifyability. We say that a... sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express--that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as true, or reject it as being false.... To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The advantage man enjoys, which makes itself felt from his childhood, is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter... to his destiny as a male. Through his identification of phallus and transcendence, it turns out that his social and spiritual successes endow him with a virile prestige. He is not divided. Whereas it is required of woman that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject. It is this conflict that especially marks the situation of the emancipated woman. She refuses to confine herself to her role as female, because she will not accept mutilation; but it would also be a mutilation to repudiate her sex. Man is a human being with sexuality; woman is a complete individual, equal to the male, only if she too is a human being with sexuality. To renounce her femininity is to renounce a part of her humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind only if he arrives there in full possession of his partial faculties--th...at is, providing he is perfectly aware of the precise nature of sight and does not confuse it with second sight ... nor with madness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligenc...e with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Different... points of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today's Communism can survive only if it abandons the myth of an infallible party, if it continues to think, and if it becomes dem...ocratic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »